Crossing Wyoming Again

After another hearty Waffle House breakfast, we headed
north, letting I-25 take us north out of Colorado and all the way across
Wyoming, until it merged into I-90 about 30 miles south of Sheridan. The
driving was generally easy except right at the beginning, when we fell in with
a knot of traffic that took some time to untangle.

We bought gas in Douglas, WY, and ate lunch in Casper at the
Red and White Café, located in a neighborhood of used-car lots, pawnshops, and
run-down motels. My sandwich was of grilled ham and “Swiss,” which greatly
resembled the light-colored (i.e.,
non-orange) variety of American cheese, but tasted good all the same, and the
fries were excellent. I asked for a Dr. Pepper, but they were only able to
supply the Coca-Cola counterpart to that Pepsi product, which is named “Mr.
Pibb.” (I prefer Dr. Pepper.)

The short Colorado part of our trip, right at the beginning,
was through a broad, well-irrigated valley where a lot of farming was going on.
Wyoming started out the same, but after Cheyenne the land got increasingly
higher and dryer. It was mostly grassland. There was some sagebrush, but the
terrain never looked like the bleak Great Basin. Three or four times we saw
antelope grazing near the highway, which was guarded by the usual line of snow
barriers.

As we continued north, we saw first the Laramie and then the
Bighorn Mountains on the western horizon. In the Bighorns we could see a
cluster of snowcapped peaks behind a sheer wall of lower mountains that looked
to us like the edge of a crustal block. Closer to us, and stretching as far as
we could see to the east, were rolling, grassy hills, increasingly green as we
got closer to Sheridan and the Montana state line. We arrived at the motel in
Sheridan at four, having logged nearly 400 miles for the day. Our odometer read
19,938; so far we had traveled 7,947 miles.

Though Sheridan was the northernmost place we had been on
the trip so far, the temperature registered 93°
on the car thermometer when we got there. Except for when we’d been stuck in
the traffic jam in El Paso, this was the highest reading we’d observed anywhere
up to then, including the Mojave Desert.

At dinnertime we took a tip I’d found on the Frommer website
and went to Sanford’s Pub and Grub, which is one of a chain of five or six
located in various cities in the mountain states. It was elaborately funky,
with old beer signs, license plates, and so on nailed to every available
surface. Dorothea ordered a huge chicken fajita salad with triangles of
deep-fried flour tortillas and salsa on the side. Since the Frommer listing had
praised their Cajun food, I had crawfish jambalaya, which I ordered medium hot.
This was as hot as I’d ever want any food to be, but fortunately it wasn’t too
hot to enjoy thoroughly. I drank a 25-oz. stein of their self-brewed amber ale (on
special for $3.00 that evening) and found it perfectly acceptable though not an
occasion for major rejoicing. The jambalaya came with potato-cheese soup and
vinegary Cajun beans, both good, plus a deep-fried submarine (“hoagie”) roll
and honey butter — this was odd but tasty. We passed up dessert in favor of
eating a Belgian chocolate bar we had bought ourselves in Fort Collins.

The Little Bighorn Battlefield

Since our motel didn’t offer breakfast, we crossed the
street to Kim’s Korean-American Family Restaurant, which (according to a sign
in the window) did. I ordered a bowl of oatmeal with raisins and a cinnamon
roll that turned out to be enormous — fully six inches square, and microwaved
to a state of oozing stickiness. It was intensely sweet, and I left almost
half. Dorothea had raisin bran and a blueberry muffin, which was also large and
microwaved, but fortunately not sticky. There were no Korean items on the
breakfast menu — not that we really wanted to start the day with
kimchee — but the menu showed that lunch and dinner were a different
story. The place seemed to be popular with Sheridan’s blue-collar citizens,
many of whom live in that neighborhood.

We filled the tank and set forth, and had no difficulty
getting to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, which is 70 miles to
the north on the Crow Reservation in Montana. However, the battle site took
longer than we’d planned — almost two hours — to see. We had decided
go east from there on US-212, then take a little, twisty mountain road south to
Devil’s Tower. This route was 40 miles shorter than the one we’d planned, and
it also eliminated about 100 miles of backtracking. But we weren’t ready to
leave the battle site until 12:30, and we got worried about the unknown quality
of the shorter route. We decided to revert to plan A (shown on the map).

The Little Bighorn site is a sobering place to visit. The
grassy ridges are as bare as they were in 1876, and the shady river valley
where the Lakota and Cheyenne were camped looks as cool and pleasant as it must
have looked then, even with the roads and farms it now contains.

Scattered across the
bare ridges are little white gravestones, each marking the place where a
cavalry trooper died. These are not actual gravestones, but markers placed by
the Army in 1890 to indicate where the soldiers fell.

At the site where Custer
and most of his men were killed, there is a small cemetery with the markers
arranged in rows, but although bodies were hastily buried there a couple of
days after the battle, the bones were removed a few years later and buried en
masse under a large monument a few feet away. Custer was reburied at West
Point, and some other officers’ remains were also taken to Eastern cemeteries
at that time. Their names are on markers in the little cemetery. Some black
paint has been applied to the background on Custer’s monument so that his name
can be read from outside the iron fence that surrounds the “graves,” and there
was a little flag stuck in the ground next to it, although (since this was only
four days after Memorial Day) I don’t know if it’s a permanent fixture.

I don't know how the Army decided exactly where to place
those monuments on the ridges, 14 years after the battle, but they are
certainly evocative.

Since the early 1990s there has been some effort to balance
the presentation of the battle site, which before that time was exclusively a
monument to Custer and his troopers. Three markers (appropriately carved of red
stone) now show where two Cheyenne and one Lakota chief fell; a nearby
interpretive sign says that the locations had been marked with cairns by the
chiefs’ families.

Down the hill a bit from the “last stand” monuments is a new
one that memorializes the Native American side. Appropriately large and impressive, it was completed in 2002. And a small
marker has even been set up over the grave of the cavalry horses killed in the
battle (some by their riders, who needed the horses’ bodies
for cover on the bare hillside).

In the visitor center, Dorothea overheard a man complaining
to the park rangers that “Sitting Bull’s monument” was bigger than
Custer’s. The irony was compounded by the fact that most of the rangers
appeared to be Native Americans. And probably, since the site is on their
reservation, at least some of them were Crows, a tribe whose members (very few
of them, but they were the only Crows present) took part in the battle as
scouts for the 7th Cavalry. One irony follows another.

Thinking about everything that brought both sides to that
place in 1876, one is left with a kind of generalized mild sadness and sympathy
— for the losers, who looked like us, and who fought and died in the wrong
cause; and for the winners, who didn’t look like us, whose cause that day was
just, and who, in spite of their victory, were thoroughly crushed not much
later. It’s probably impossible for a present-day white American — at least it
is for me — to harbor a sincere wish, in spite of the terrible injustice of the
Indian wars, that the Indians had been completely victorious. Nor does it do
any good to wish that the two peoples had reached a peaceful accommodation of equals. Of
course that’s a good thing to wish, but it probably wasn’t possible, at least
at that time,for two cultures so
totally different to come to any such terms. So I felt haunted, at the Little
Bighorn battlefield, by sadness and vain regret.

The next day we would be close enough to Wounded Knee to go
there. But neither of us thought we’d be able to stand it.